Reading, Watching, Listening #14

Nostalgic TV, trivial antisemitism, the West Bank on Erdoğan, Ankara-Washington's new normal

This is the series where I share some of the things I’ve been reading, watching and listening to. The first headline is for everyone, the rest is for paid subscribers only.

Traffic Lights in Ankara read "Free Palestine" on green and "Murderer Israel" on red. I know what you're thinking: what does it say on yellow? Source: TRT

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Strategic Obfuscation

The Turkey Book Talk podcast is now on Substack! I highly recommend that you check it out. It’s an invaluable resource for anyone following Turkey at a high level. I’m also happy to see Turkey-related content growing on the Substack ecosystem.

I especially liked the recent episode covering Bilge Yeşil’s book on Turkey’s global media operations, like TRT World or Daily Sabah. She comes up with the term “Strategic Obfuscation” which I found particularly useful. This is straight from her book:

Strategic obfuscation doesn’t revolve around disseminating falsehoods; rather, it focuses on accentuating specific facts, disregarding others, simplifying complex events into binary dichotomies… it does not fabricate falsehoods regarding Turkey or its adversaries. It brings attention to certain powerful truths (e.g., Islamophobia in Europe, colonialism in Africa, Western military interventions in the Middle East) but it strategically obscures their complex underpinnings and implications, simplifying them into binary oppositions (e.g., East versus West, moral versus immoral).

This gets at a theme that I like to cover in this blog, which is the relationship between the Turkish right and the Western left. Turkey’s media operations often live in that cleavage.